RSS and Outlook: Make the Information Come to You (Outlook 2007)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a growing phenomenon on the Web. It is a great way to get new information (in the form of RSS feeds) from your favorite web sites to come to you automatically. Once you subscribe to a feed, any information posted to the feed starts appearing in your RSS reader. Using the RSS reader in Outlook 2007, you can receive and manage articles from RSS feeds almost as if they were e-mail messages.

Subscribing to RSS Feeds

You must subscribe to the RSS feeds you want to read. You can do this in three ways, each of which is described on its own page. Whatever else you do, I urge you to try out the section on pasting a link. There are two reasons for this. One, as RSS spreads, I think this will be the most common way to subscribe to feeds. Two, by working through the procedure in this section, you will subscribe to the Living with Outlook RSS feed! I use this feed to keep you up to date on the latest Outlook information.

The three ways to subscribe are:

Subscribe by pasting a link into the reader.

Subscribe using the Outlook RSS Feeds Home Page.

Subscribe by invitation (using Share This Feed and exporting feeds) to one or more feeds.

Working with RSS Feeds in Outlook

Let's see what you can do with those new RSS feeds. As you can see here, a view of an RSS feed in Outlook looks a lot like an e-mail view, and it acts like one too. You can virtually anything to articles in an RSS feed that you can do to an e-mail message except reply to them.

The Living with Outlook RSS feed as displayed in Outlook 2007.

There are, however, some differences between RSS articles and e-mail messages. You can't reply to articles, and you can use the special Share This Feed to share them with others. Beyond that, when you select an article, it appears in the Reading pane as you would expect At the top of the message you see the title of the article, and where it comes from. Below that, the InfoBar gives you some options.

Click the InfoBar to select whether to view the full article in your web browser, or download all content related to that article. RSS feeds often deliver only a small part of the entire article.

Read the fragment of the article that Outlook downloaded, and use that information to decide whether you want to read the entire article, or download it and any attachments.

Return to the Living with Outlook home page.